45 rocket launchers
350+ satellites operators
30+ international partners
Product Desktop
Contributing to the European leader in drone light shows reaching new heights.
Contractor — May 2023 to October 2023
45 rocket launchers
350+ satellites operators
30+ international partners
Product Desktop
Contractor — May 2023 to October 2023
Based in Bordeaux, Dronisos is at the crossroads of art, science and technology. For more than 10 years, Dronisos has been choreographing and directing drone light shows all over the world, whether for permanent shows (Disneyland, Puy du Fou, etc.) or one-off events (24 Hours of Le Mans, Bordeaux Wine Festival, Millennium of Mont St-Michel, etc.)
After more than 10 years in business, Dronisos has established itself as a major player in drone shows.
As a 360 degree actor, Dronisos is involved in every aspect of the business, from the choreography of the show to operating the flight itself, as well as R&D — both in terms of hardware and firmware of their drones — and the maintenance of their fleet.
Developed and used almost exclusively in-house until the beginning of 2023, Dronisos' business tools had never before passed through the hands of designers.
With recent and future developments in the industry, Dronisos wants to focus on larger (over 1500 drones) and longer shows (a drone has an autonomy of 15 to 20 minutes, so a longer show involves several fleets in parallel).
It therefore became essential to overhaul their tools, both to adapt them to these new technical constraints and to improve their general ergonomics so that they could be made available to service providers to outsource certain projects.
The softwares maintained by Dronisos needed to be improved, and their functional and graphic choices standardised, to facilitate gateways and pool certain future developments.
Before I joined Dronisos for that mission, the one and only designer to ever step in the company was the acting PO, Erisa.
She's the one who insisted they hire a designer to help with the necessary changes. With a total of four different in-house softwares, and tens of developers working on them, the amount of design work was huge.
I was able to focus on the delivery when she was in charge of the roadmap and features prioritization. Together we pushed forward a design vision, introducing research and graphic iteration stages into the developers' sprints.
The aim was to show them how much time they could save by integrating a design phase upstream, rather than rushing into developing features (each in their own way.)
The first few days were devoted to immersing myself in the company's business and culture while discovering the various Dronisos products as well. The most important being the DCC (Drone Control Center), their drone show management tool.
I conducted as many informal interviews as I could with many of the stakeholders, whether developers with an extensive knowledge of the products, or drone operators, who were in-house end-users. It allowed me to get as comprehensive a picture as possible. My aim was to take a step back and bring a fresh perspective to teams whose noses have been to the grindstone for nearly 10 years.
Now that I had a good understanding of the ins and outs, I was able to question all the previous choices that seemed illogical, as well as those that I simply didn't understand.
Most of the functionalities were stacked in a single screen, like tetris. The accumulated technical debt was colossal. And certain behaviors, which had become habits, made no sense to new end-users. For example, the main view offered a grid view of the drone fleet. Each drone was represented by a button containing two icons, corresponding to different states or alerts.
This view was not used by any operator.
They found it too busy, and nobody knew exactly what the icons referred to. Operators systematically switched to the map to get a realistic view of their fleet's GPS position.
Everything was "working". But nothing was truely optimized. It's like a house where the front door opens on the bedroom and you have to go through the WC to enter the kitchen. It "works". You can live in it for years if you will. But the moment you wanna rent it you know you're gonna have a bad time.
That's when the PO and I decided to take action. She already knew things were not ideal. Now we were two to shake things up a little 👀
After starting to rethink the app in depth, I had the opportunity to attend various flying demos, including a rehearsal for a big show for Disney. Axel, my manager at Designshot at that time, was also there.
It was during this rehearsal that I realized that, in addition to improvements to the software itself, adjustments needed to be made to the physical setup on site. Indeed, the operator was constantly switching between different windows on his laptop to give information to the technicians on the ground while preparing his flight.
By installing a monitoring screen, visible to all, we'd allow the operator to focus on his job.
Together with Axel we also came with the idea of an color code to identify the different alerts drones might send during fleet set-up: low battery, lost GPS, connection with the DCC...
Alongside these phases of observation and study, and before proposing an in-depth redesign, I began to refine the existing product. I was also asked to provide graphic responses to the new features in the backlog. Those were quick design iterations facilitated by the UI kit provided with their JS framework.
By early summer, I had finished repairing and improving the existing product. Erisa and I then decided to tackle v2 of the DCC.
We embarked on a new quick discovery phase, during which we listed all the needs that the product had to meet and organized them into different thematic sections of the app.
Our observations in the field enabled us to back up our vision with real data and convince Alan, the lead dev, of the merits of a more radical redesign.
My mission was coming to an end so I only had the time to deliver 2 screens (fleet management and flight choreography settings) out of 5 planned. Luckily the 3 remaining were simpler and based on already existing features so, even though I was frustrated that we couldn't go further at that time, I knew the devs could manage on their own.
The main application, the DCC (for Drone Control Center) which supervises the fleet before and during the show, was a patchwork of useful functions all packed in the same screen, making the interface overloaded.
By reorganising and prioritising the data and features needed at different stages of a project, we were able to bring out several corresponding environments, in order to create clearer and more precise thematic screens.
During the mission, I was able to see that in addition to improvements to the interface and the user paths, the physical setup during flight operations also needed to be reviewed.
To facilitate the work of the teams on the ground, additional monitoring screens and a coding system for the various alerts were proposed.
As the second designer to ever set foot at Dronisos, I had to assimilate the historical and technical knowledge of the developers, while at the same time ensuring that the real needs of the operators were heard, which sometimes differed from the features that had been developed or prioritised.
Working in tandem with the in-house PO, we were able to push some significant but necessary changes to the products.
